A novel Intrusion Detection System for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) based on differences of traffic flow and position

Abstract Vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted great interests from both industry and academia, but a number of issues, particularly security, have not been readily addressed. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) as one of the most important approaches to protect network security has been studied adequately in previous literatures. However, the performance of IDSs still needs to be improved to adapt the scenario of VANETs which are very fast moving and highly dynamic. In this paper, we propose a novel IDS that is able to be appropriately used in the wireless and dynamic networks, like VANETs. It mainly contains a novel feature extraction algorithm and a classifier based on an improved growing hierarchical self-organizing map (I-GHSOM) for IDS in VANETs. The proposed feature extraction algorithm is used to quickly extract distinct features from vehicle messages for IDS’s training and test. In the proposed algorithm, two key features including the differences of traffic flow and of position are extracted. The former feature is calculated according to the range of the distance between vehicles, while both a voting filter mechanism and a semi-cooperative mechanism are designed to get the latter feature. Furthermore, in the I-GHSOM-based classifier, for quickly attaining precise classification results, two novel mechanisms (relabeling and recalculating mechanisms) are proposed to relabel the units of GHSOM and check whether the balance of GHSOM structure is broken or not. Simulation results show that the proposed IDS is better than others in the measurement of accuracy, stability, processing efficiency and message scales.